People & HR

How to set compensation bands as CPG Founders

People & HRFor CPG Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're a two- or three-person CPG team and you've never formally set compensation bands. You've been hiring reactively — you posted a role, got candidates, and negotiated ad hoc. Now you have a warehouse associate making more than your first ops hire, a broker manager whose base is out of step with industry, and a part-time demand planner who's about to find out. You've been pulling comps from LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and the occasional industry Slack group. Nothing is documented. When a new co-packer relationship means you need a second QA coordinator, you have no anchors for what to offer. And if you ever do a proper fundraise or add a board member, 'we just figure it out' is not a defensible answer.

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People & HRFor CPG Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A documented compensation band framework organized by CPG-relevant role families — production & QA, supply chain & logistics, sales & broker management, marketing & e-commerce, and G&A — with pay ranges tied to market benchmarks and your current headcount stage

A living internal wiki that houses your band logic, the assumptions behind each range, and a history of how bands have changed so any future hire or board conversation has a paper trail

A scenario model showing what your fully-loaded payroll looks like if you fill your next three open roles at the midpoint of each band, and how that affects runway

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Knowledge Management Scenario Analysis

Data sources & config

Knowledge Management connects to Notion so Starch syncs your existing Notion pages on a schedule — any comp-related docs you already have there get pulled in as a starting point. Scenario Analysis connects to Plaid and Stripe as scheduled-sync providers, so the baseline burn rate and revenue numbers reflect your actual accounts rather than estimates. For market benchmarking data from compensation survey sites that don't have APIs, Starch automates your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a compensation band wiki for a 12-person CPG brand. I need role families for: production and QA, supply chain and logistics, sales and broker management, e-commerce and marketing, and G&A. For each role family, create pages for individual contributor, senior IC, and manager levels. Each page should include a pay range field, a notes field for how we benchmarked it, a last-reviewed date, and a section for job scope. Auto-flag any page that hasn't been updated in 6 months.

Show me what happens to runway if I hire a Director of Sales at $120k base, a demand planner at $75k, and a QA coordinator at $55k over the next two quarters. Use my actual Plaid and Stripe data as the baseline burn and revenue. Model two scenarios: one where I close a $2M raise in Q3, one where I don't.

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Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Audit your current payroll by pulling all active employee records from Paylocity or ADP — Starch syncs your payroll data on a schedule and surfaces each employee's current base, role title, and start date in a single view.

2 Group your current roles into CPG-relevant families: production and QA (line leads, QA coordinators, food safety managers), supply chain (demand planners, logistics coordinators, co-packer relationship managers), sales (broker managers, retail account managers, DTC/e-commerce managers), and G&A (ops, finance, admin).

3 Tell Starch to build the compensation band wiki using Knowledge Management. Describe the structure you want — role families, levels per family, fields per page — and Starch builds it. You don't configure pages manually.

4 Populate market benchmarks for each band. For sources that have public web interfaces — compensation databases, food industry salary surveys, LinkedIn Salary — Starch automates your browser to pull the relevant ranges without you copy-pasting.

5 Document the benchmark methodology on each wiki page: which sources you used, what geography and headcount range you filtered to, and when you pulled the data. This is the audit trail a board member or investor will ask for.

6 Map your current employees to their bands. Flag anyone sitting below the floor or above the ceiling of their band — these are your immediate remediation conversations.

7 Set a band update cadence. Tell Starch to auto-flag any compensation band page that hasn't been reviewed in six months so bands don't go stale as your company grows.

8 Run your hiring plan through Scenario Analysis. List the roles you expect to fill in the next two quarters, assign each a target midpoint from your new bands, and let Starch model the payroll impact against your actual burn from Plaid and revenue from Stripe.

9 Model at least two scenarios: one where you fill roles on schedule and one where two roles slip a quarter. See how each affects your runway and when you'd need to raise or cut burn.

10 Export the scenario output and use Starch to build a one-pager summarizing your comp philosophy, band ranges, and headcount plan assumptions — useful for a board update or a Series A data room.

11 As you make actual offers, log the offer amount and accepted comp on the relevant wiki page so you build a record of where in the band real hires landed over time.

12 Repeat the benchmark refresh annually or after any round closes — tell Starch to pull updated comp data from the same browser-automatable sources and surface what's drifted more than 10% from your current bands.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Band-setting sprint for a 14-person CPG brand ahead of a Series A process, Q2 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Production Lead (Band floor / mid / ceiling)	52,000
QA Coordinator (Band floor / mid / ceiling)	48,000
Demand Planner (Band floor / mid / ceiling)	72,000
Broker Manager (Band floor / mid / ceiling)	78,000
E-commerce Manager (Band floor / mid / ceiling)	80,000
Director of Sales (open role, target midpoint)	118,000

A better-for-you snack brand with $4.2M in trailing revenue and 14 employees is preparing for a Series A. Their lead investor's diligence checklist includes a comp philosophy document and evidence that no current employee is more than 20% outside their band. The founder pulls current salaries from ADP — Starch syncs the payroll data on a schedule — and immediately sees the problem: the warehouse lead hired in year one is at $58k, above the $52k floor but inside a band that doesn't formally exist anywhere. The demand planner they hired six months ago at $69k is below what Starch's browser automation pulled from two industry comp databases as the regional midpoint ($72k). The founder uses Knowledge Management to build out six role-family pages in one session, documents the benchmarks and sources on each, and flags the demand planner's comp for a Q3 correction. Then they run Scenario Analysis: filling the open Director of Sales role at $118k midpoint plus the demand planner correction to $74k adds $193k in annualized payroll. Against their current $310k/month burn and $180k/month in Stripe revenue, the model shows 11 months of runway at current raise rate — enough to close the round before they need to make cuts. That number goes into the board deck. The whole process took one working session instead of the two-week spreadsheet archaeology it would have been otherwise.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Percentage of current employees sitting within their compensation band (target: 100% within 6 months of band implementation)

Payroll as a percentage of gross revenue by quarter — critical for CPG brands where COGS already compress margins

Average time-to-offer for open roles after bands are set (bands eliminate back-and-forth and compress decision time)

Runway impact of hiring plan at band midpoints vs. band ceilings (the delta tells you how much negotiation flexibility you actually have)

Band staleness rate — number of role pages not reviewed in the last 6 months, tracked automatically by the wiki

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Radford / Mercer / Levels.fyi (manual pull)

Enterprise comp databases are accurate but charge $10k–$50k/year and are built for HR teams at 200-person companies — you'll pay for data you can't use and get no help documenting or modeling it.

Spreadsheet built from Glassdoor + LinkedIn Salary scraping

Free and fast to start, but it lives in one person's Drive folder, goes stale immediately, and has no connection to your actual payroll or runway — so you can't model the cost of filling open roles without rebuilding the math every time.

Rippling or Lattice compensation modules

Good products, but you're paying for a full HRIS or performance management platform to get the comp module — overkill for a 12-person CPG team, and neither connects your band decisions to your financial runway.

Fractional HR consultant

A good fractional HR person will build you a solid band framework in 4–6 weeks, but at $150–$250/hour it costs $3k–$8k, and the output is usually a static document that you own zero infrastructure to maintain or update.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — knowledge management, scenario planning all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch have pre-built compensation band templates for CPG roles specifically?

There's no CPG-specific comp template in the App Store today. You build it using Knowledge Management — describe the role families and page structure you want, and Starch builds the wiki for you. The advantage over a template is that you're building exactly the structure that matches how your company is actually organized, not fitting your roles into someone else's taxonomy.

Where does the market benchmarking data come from? Does Starch have a comp database built in?

Starch doesn't have a proprietary compensation database. For benchmarking, you have two options: connect sources from Starch's integration catalog if they have an API, or use browser automation for any compensation survey site or public database you can log into. Starch automates your browser to pull ranges without you manually copying rows — but you still decide which sources to trust and document the methodology on the wiki page.

My payroll is in Paylocity. Can Starch actually pull that data?

Yes — Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule, including employees, payroll runs, and compensation fields. That's what lets you see current salaries mapped against your new bands without exporting anything manually.

Can I use this for contractor comp, not just full-time employees?

Yes. Your Knowledge Management wiki can have pages for any worker type you want to track — FTEs, contractors, co-packer staff, agency relationships. The structure is whatever you describe. The payroll sync from Paylocity or ADP covers W-2 employees; for contractors paid through other channels, you'd document their rates manually on the wiki page or pull from QuickBooks if you pay them as vendors (Starch syncs QuickBooks vendor data on a schedule).

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm putting compensation data in here.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's worth knowing before you store sensitive payroll data. It's on the roadmap, but we'd rather tell you honestly than have you find out during a vendor security review.

How does the Scenario Analysis connect to my real financials vs. just making me enter assumptions?

Starch syncs your Plaid transactions and Stripe revenue on a schedule, so when you open Scenario Analysis the baseline burn and revenue numbers are pulled from your actual accounts — not a spreadsheet you maintain. You adjust only the assumptions you want to test: in this case, the annualized cost of each role you're filling at its band midpoint, and the quarter you expect each hire to start.